You want your blog posts to reach people. Because you work hard to create beautiful content.

All passionate blog writers do.

So what’s the best way to reach readers, day in and day out?

Search engines.

Search engines are the largest platforms for audiences to find your content. So to help you rank on page one, we asked experts for their unique blog SEO tips.

Keep reading to learn their expert techniques.

Write Headlines That Promise to Solve a Problem

Blog headlines are a key ingredient in any blog SEO recipe. You’re able to mention your target keyword in your blog headings throughout your post. And when you do this, you’re adding SEO juice to your post. Because search engines give weight to headline tags.

Another outside-box-reason is that they entice your readers. By promising to solve a problem, your readers will stick to your content like glue. This increases site dwell time, which boosts your search engine ranks.

Write a headline that promises to solve a problem or educate the reader. As much as possible, use your keywords at the beginning or end of your headline because that’s what people remember most. And use the same keywords in the first paragraph of the article to make sure the content and headline go together.

Answer User Search Intent with your Blog

Search users are savvy. They know exactly what they want. So you have to meet their needs. And this is where search intent matching comes into play.

Search intent is the purpose behind a user’s search. It’s a deeper look at what searchers are actually looking for. So you have to decipher what their search intent is: Are searchers looking for knowledge or insights? Maybe they’re evaluating product features. Or looking to make a purchase.

Focus on answering searcher intent. Every search query is a question, and it’s up to you make your blog post the best possible answer. Examine top ranking pages for your target keyword, and figure out how to do what they do – but better.

Google’s Penguin update discounted the influence of links and increased the influence of quality markers (like bounce rate) indicating a page attracts and keeps the attention of searchers.

If your post is a good answer to a searcher’s intent, it will rank. I have several blog posts in top 3 positions with no backlinks and minimal on-page SEO.

SEO your Blog URL

A blog URL is no big deal, right? Think again. Blog URL structure factors into Google’s ranking algorithm. So you need to make sure you’re taking advantage of this quick win.

A tight URL structure is key. Oftentimes the URL will default to the article’s title and include stop words like “to, the, at, if” etc. Revise the URL to hit on the keyword or main idea of the article.

Make your Blog Mobile-Friendly

If you’re in digital marketing, you know mobile is taking over. And search engines like Google aren’t messing around with this trend.

Because mobile traffic holds the majority of search, Google wants to make sure it’s giving it’s user great results. So if you’re blog isn’t delivering a beautiful mobile experience, it’s time to hit the drawing board.

Ensure blog posts are AMP validated. For searches on mobile devices, AMP takes mobile-friendliness to the next level. As Google and other engines continue to emphasize mobile usability, AMP is becoming increasingly important, especially for sites with blogs.

If you’re on WordPress, consider checking on the Yoast plugin and experimenting with posting the AMP versions of your URLs to your social media channels. Be sure to monitor traffic to those pages and look for ways to always improve clickthrough rate and user engagement.

Republish your Blog on Popular Content Networks

This blog SEO technique is blowing up. And for good reason. Republishing your blogs on content networks opens your content up to huge audiences. It also gives you the opportunity to generate a backlink and drive social engagement.

You’re probably familiar with a lot of these networks already. Think of Medium, LinkedIn, and Tumblr.

Republishing your blog content on content networks allows you to drive additional traffic to your blog as well as gain backlinks and social engagement that can help boost SEO.

Warning: Be sure to give your blog post time to get indexed in Google and link the republished version back to the original copy. This will help prevent Google from thinking the republished site was the source.

Write High-Quality Blog Content

Your blogs won’t make Google’s first page if readers don’t see value. And because of this, you have to write high-quality content.

Google takes its results seriously. Quality indicators like dwell time play a huge role in this. And also off-page SEO factors like backlinks to your posts, and social shares. All of these factors show content quality.

Content that ranks the highest paralleled academic papers. It contains source, data, well-constructed paragraphs, and good analysis. I create content with a purpose and it was high-quality, not something churned out for a word count, or because content needed to be written for a calendar. It answers a question that consumers were asking. I also keep it easy enough to read to engage users.

Combine this concept with traditional SEO tips and you’ll have success too.

Social Media for Blog SEO

Social ranking factors are always a topic of discussion. Because engagement works as validation. Users willing to share your content are giving their stamp of approval. And search engines take notice.

Have a big focus on social media for SEO as well as traffic building purposes. Google is now looking to social media as a signal of blog authority and relevance.

If thousands of people are tweeting about it then chances are you have written something useful. And the best way to get tweets is to build a loyal following and write killer content that they love to promote for you.

Some things you need to start doing:

Get to know the big players in your niche by casually building a rapport with them on Twitter. Down the track, you can hit them up for re-tweets. Post information that doesn’t appear on your blog. Think of it as a separate resource for people to tap into. The more content you share from other bloggers the more likely they are to share your stuff. Give and then get later.

Blog SEO Tips – Optimizing your Blog Posts for Search Engines

Boosting blog SEO starts with implementing relevant techniques. Thanks to our contributors for weighing in with their expert tips and sharing their knowledge with our readers.

And this isn’t the end of our blog SEO tips list. Every marketer has their unique strategies for increasing SEO. Make sure to jump in on the conversation in the comments below.

20 Comments

Writing about trending topics on your blog is a surefire way of gaining organic and social traction for the post. We’re using Pagezii on competitor and industry blogs to find what’s trending there – works great to show industry resonating tags, new hot topics and frequency of mentions across the board.

I tend to write content on my primary blog first. Then republish the same content on Medium, WordPress and LinkedIn – but each time I publish, I make sure I provide a backlink to the original post. Sometimes if I’ve time, I will repurpose my original content to fit these different platforms. I do it for two reasons – 1) I’d like to keep the content slightly different, as not to get dinged for duplicate content, and 2) To optimize the content for each platform’s audience (e.g. LinkedIn traffic love story telling, so I make the post more emotional to get higher social traction). Anyway, this technique has helped rank my original post higher.

That’s a great technique that I see more and more bloggers use on medium and WordPress. For example, I’ll find an interesting post on medium, click and get the gist of the post. If I want to continue reading, there’s a link that directs me to the blogger’s site. And like you said you can provide a backlink in the post. I think we can expect to see this strategy used in the future. Thanks for sharing the tips!

We started to promote our blog on social channels aggressively. I am not sure why, but after that we have seen a significant uptake in traffic. At first we thought it was because of Social traffic, that more people are getting to hear about our content in a viral way. But the funny thing is that its also improved our Search engine rankings. And we use Google Search Console to keep track of backlinks, its not as if we had a boost on backlinks. So in short, I think Google is using Social footprint of your posts to indicate how important it is. Here’s a good read from 2015 https://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-signals-affect-seo/135956/

Yeah, despite what we’ve heard from Google in the past, it seems social signals definitely play a role in SEO. And tying your point back to Blog SEO, you have to make sure you’re promoting content across popular networks. You should also have social buttons available for readers. This can boost social shares for your blog ten-fold. Thanks for sharing the SEJ post too 🙂

I think these are good on-page SEO techniques. But keep in mind you also need to do technical SEO on your site. This means fast page load times. Google wants users to have a good experience, which doesn’t only mean showing content that matches, but also content in a nice, clean and FAST way. So keep these technical SEO tips in mind as well.

Pages in WordPress are designed to be static – so by nature they don’t have the publish date visible. Posts on the other hand are dynamic and display a date. We’ve run some tests to see which types of pages/posts rank better. Our experiments are still on going. In the meantime I suggest you publish post content as a post. If it starts to get too old, then you should prune it and update. This way Google will always continue to rank you well, and your content is then “living”. It changes to reflect current trends, etc.

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